Completion Makes the Tragedy

As mentioned in my previous Austrian Death Machine review—this series, which I’m calling the Backlog Rifle, consists of me sorting through the old and forgotten discs in my collection and seeing if there’s anything there worth listening to… and ruthlessly mocking the things which turned out not to have been worth listening to.

… In that pursuit, I saw this album lurking around among my old Blind Guardian CDs. It had been advertised to me, I remember, as a collaboration between Soilwork’s Björn Strid and the session musicians from BG, so I was expecting something really awesome. Something which brought together some of the killer grooves of Soilwork and the frenetic speed and epic orchestral sensibilities of BG, for example. I remember having been underwhelmed, and deeply frustrated, at my first listen. As it turns out—some first impressions are, in fact, accurate. The two tracks that caught my positive attention were ‘Low’ and ‘At Last’, as these have some interesting riffs and some decent aggression and speed. The entire rest of the album, though, is a steaming hot pile of putrid garbage.

Completion Makes the Tragedy is sterile, soulless, toneless, churning and overproduced corporate dreck. It is obvious to me that cobbling together a band like this from three different countries laying down tracks independently and then kludging them together in production at the very end has produced the very worst of results: music that is anemic, muddy and without direction. It’s not completion that makes the tragedy here, folks: it’s over-completion. More specifically, I guess, it’s laziness in songwriting and over-filtering through various production gimmicks.

It’s hard to keep even the tracks straight. Except for the two aforementioned ones which I perked up my ears at and thought, ‘oh hey, this doesn’t actually suck’—the rest just bleed into each other in a great formless, shapeless morass of mass-produced mallcore chug. The only things that stand out as listenable are Strid’s vocals and Stauch’s drumming (especially on ‘On My Way’, damn!), but… But even then Strid just sounds most of the time like he’s phoning it in. His delivery is limp, anemic, almost bored. And his voice is so often dubbed-over with robotic effects (as in ‘Reflection’, say) that it’s hard to understand what he’s saying or how he’s inflecting it. The background is so stuffed full of electronic effects, and the guitars have been so chopped up with editing, that it’s hard to tell what this would sound like live. (Then again—this is not a band that evidently performs live, so…)

This isn’t a case of me disliking the genre, either. I actually do, selectively, like me some groove metal and industrial metal… if it’s played with some degree of heart. It seems to me that calling this bleak, faceless dreck ‘industrial’ would be a grave insult to bands like Ministry, White Zombie and Der Apokalyptischen Reiter who approach their music with something like a sense of integrity, and to call it ‘groove metal’ or ‘metalcore’ would be an insult to bands in such genres with actual talent and soul: such as HMR and Ego Fall. I wouldn’t even deign to liken this to Pro-Pain—regardless of what you think of the music, Pro-Pain at least has a valid and sincerely-held political perspective. Coldseed lacks even that!

Nope. This is one album from my backlog that should have well and truly have stayed buried. Damn, what a waste of my time, energy, and probably money as well (though, I suppose there’s no use crying over that spilt milk by now, twelve years on).

4 / 20

Some say that children say the strangest things, but as far as I’m concerned, the real saying out to be something more along the lines of “well known metal musicians get the strangest ideas in their heads when they get bored” when dealing with Coldseed’s debut “Completion Makes The Tragedy”. I’m not sure what the hell Thomen and Bjorn were thinking when they strung this bunch together, but trying to make sense of the results is quite a chore. As best as I can tell, they brought Blind Guardian’s two live backup musicians as charter members, recruited 2 no named guitarists from Spain, and proceeded to completely abandon any pretext of familiarity with their respective audience. What is heard on here has more in common with Fear Factory, Damageplan, and Pro-Pain than anything that either Soilwork or Blind Guardian have done previously, and the results are pretty lackluster, and at times downright ugly.

Perhaps the one area where the band shows some semblance of consistency is in their sound dichotomy of dull, muddy guitar chugs and spacey, techno-like keyboard gimmicks. The sound most clashes with itself on multiple levels, even more so than the worst albums put out by Fear Factory and Ministry. The few bright spots are where the band kicks up the tempo and trades out ripping off Pantera for borrowing from Nevermore, and it’s a marginal step up given that the two axe men in congress lack Jeff Loomis’ inventiveness and technical ability, though a couple of marginally decent solos occur like the one heard on “Low”, which also happens to be the best song on here in all its club rave meets Warrel Dane confusion. The vocal work is utterly schizophrenic, occasional conjuring up images of Phil Anselmo, at others Burton Bell, and occasionally like Ville Valo (as odd as that may sound), but going way overboard on the studio magic and overdubs, to the point of becoming a disjointed mess.

If every individual element of this album were pulled apart from the rest and put into a more appropriate musical context, they’d be average to moderately enjoyable, but this album just reeks of desperation to try something different without any regard for consistency. There is literally no one that I can think to offhand who I could recommend this to, save perhaps people who eat up the drivel that the Deftones have been churning out over the past decade. I think one of the reasons why the phrase “forgiveness is divine” rings so true to me is because it takes a forgiveness of near infinite proportions to excuse good musicians putting out crap like this. Thomen Stauch had been having a lot of personal and psychological issues at this point in his life, but figuring out Bjorn’s excuse for this will be one of those questions that will be pondered over for years to come.

I didn't even know this band existed until I saw this album lying in the metal section of my local indie record store. The sticker on the packaging indicated that this band was comprised of Speed from Soilwork and former members of Blind Guardian. It also boasted that this was some sort of mindblowing experience that had never been heard before or something to that effect. Unfortunately this album isn't very good. "Reflection" is a great song but nothing else is really worth repeated listens. The music is awkward and boring for the most part. A few songs certainly made me go "WTF?" There are few uptempo power/thrash type tunes but the thin production and muddied guitar tone make these songs less appealing than they might be if they were thicker and heavier. There are some nice solos scattered throughout the album but I don't want to listen to boring songs for the occasional cool solo.

I can't really recommend this album too much. It sounds nothing like anything these band members have done in the past so don't expect anything that sounds like Soilwork, Terror 2000, or Blind Guardian. In fact, Speed really throws a curveball with his vocal delivery using far less growling and a lot more clean vocals, which themselves don't sound like the clean vocals you've heard on recent Soilwork albums. Overall this album is relatively bland and could use a dose of energy and intensity. This is not something to buy blindly like I did.